Top Tips To Maximise Your Business’ Twitter Presence.

Twitter share prices may have taken a bit of hammering in recent days after posting disappointing advertising revenue figures, but the micro-blogging social media site still remains as popular as ever.

The total number of worldwide users is estimated to be 555 million, with 135,000 new users joining the platform each day. To put Twitter’s popularity into some sort of context, there are approximately 5,700 tweets posted every second resulting in a staggering 58 million tweets every day. Twitter has proved to be particularly useful for businesses: it’s a fantastic tool for maximising business exposure, raising awareness of products and services and driving sales.

But what about businesses who are new to the platform?

How do they find the Twitter experience? Well, for many Twitter is a scary and intimidating place. Many are overwhelmed by the speed at which the platform moves: others are bamboozled by the strange language and the character limitations. But for newbies help is at hand. AllTwitter, the unofficial Twitter resource, has put together an infographic and resource fact sheet [http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/twitter-marketing-cheat-sheet_b54354] which might prove to be extremely useful for latecomers. Here are some of the more interesting facts:

The best days to tweet are Saturdays and Sundays

Early morning tweeting brings the greatest responses

Avoid tweeting between 12.00 and 6.00 pm

A recommendation from a trusted Twitter friend is 50 times more likely to trigger a purchased than average

52 per cent of shoppers made purchases based on recommendations found on social networks like Twitter

How to use Twitter more effectively:

Tweets with images garner 200 per cent more engagement

Tweets with links are 86 per cent more engaging

22 per cent more people respond to tweets with questions

If you follow 100 people , on average 33 will follow you back

Don’t ask for retweets – it looks too needy. It’s much better to share content that is worthy of being retweeted

If you want other users to retweet your posts then:

Share links and include a link to an online resource or news update for more shares

Retweet more than you self-promote for more shares

Keep your tweets brief – allow for a maximum of 80 to 110 characters to allow space for retweets